Robert Redford (1936-2025)

[diamonds]

Robert Redford

[domino harvey]

Damn RIP

[Aunt Peg]

A legend in so many ways. His film work in front of and behind the camera, his contribution to cinema with Sundance and his environmental work long dating way way back. RIP.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

This is a really tough one especially right now. Seeing him in The Hot Rock last year was a lot of fun and the goofy, breezy charm Redford showed in it really stuck in my mind. I finally watched season six of Community last month and the jokey disparaging comments about The Sting aren't dissuading me now from seeking it out! But iirc The Sting was the first time I saw Redford in a movie (albeit on tv as a youngster) and despite it being the end of the movie he and the film never left my mind. But just the legacy of Sundance was such a massive gift especially now as we're stuck with patronage like Dimes Square ffs and shuttered arts institutions or diminished/eliminated funding. A sad passing of an era but god will Redford will be impossible to forget.

[knives]

All of his GRH collaborations are great, but Waldo Pepper where he finally gets to shine on his own is my favorite.

[DimitriL]

William Goldman’s essay on The Great Waldo Pepper and how you can do everything right and still have the audience utterly reject you, that’s a great dose of film education.

[hearthesilence]

Quiz Show is easily the best film he made IMHO (either as an actor or, in this case, a director), but I always thought of him as someone who created a tremendous legacy out of his cumulative life's work rather than his individual films. Rather than put any of his movies or performances under a harsh critical light, one can step back and see how he played off an iconography he knew he couldn't shake, the result of his natural looks (he was arguably the most handsome man in American films in the 1970s) and the fickle whims of the media and American public. So he enticed a broad swath of the audience back to the theaters over and over again, not only for crowd-pleasers like The Sting and The Way We Were but for well-meaning fare like The Candidate, The Great Gatsby and All the President's Men. Good intentions were the defining aspect of his entire film career, pretty consistent for someone who devoted so much of his life to the greater good, particularly the environment (a cause that for me is more synonymous with "the greater good" than any other). Ordinary People couldn't be more earnest, and the sincere beginnings of the Sundance Film Festival only highlights how the institution's growth and transformation came to foment so much cynicism about the American film industry. To steal something Jonathan Rosenbaum once said about John Huston, I hesitate to call Redford a great actor or a great filmmaker, but he was arguably a great man of the cinema and possibly a great human being, at least in public life.

[Monterey Jack]

Ford Red Border.

[Beloved Aunt]

Quiz Show sounds good but I haven't seen it, but I don't really have any use for anything I've seen of his from Ordinary People onwards, either as director or performer. That was when he started putting a Stupid August Frame around seemingly everything he did (including his acting), even as preposterous a film as The Horse Whisperer (surely the low point of his career?). Richard Farnsworth making fun of his character in The Natural--"Do you always talk this way about yourself?"--pretty much sums up how the direction the second half of his career took was a mistake. I don't actually want to speak ill of the dead too much though, as I have great admiration for his body of work prior to 1980, even if a few of the films themselves were mediocre, he was a wonderful leading man. RIP

[domino harvey]

I think Truth was the most recent Redford film I watched and I can’t imagine sitting through it these days with everything that’s happened in the sphere of journalism and politics in the last decade. A film instantly destined for the dustbin of history. Quiz Show is a good movie, but I don’t live in a world where it’s somehow better than All the President’s Men (a movie that still holds up as a masterpiece of excitement and intrigue despite the scandal seeming awfully trivial to what’s happening now)

[Mr.DarjeelingLimited]

Watching All The President’s Men to honor him today.

[reaky]

Let me recommend his 1962 Twilight Zone episode Nothing in the Dark. More than apposite today.

[colinr0380]

Don't forget to throw in the other great conspiracy thriller Redford was involved in Three Days of the Condor as well, which is arguably the best of the run of films that Redford made with Sydney Pollack (which includes Jeremiah Johnson; starring with Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were; with Jane Fonda in The Electric Horseman; and with Meryl Streep in Out of Africa; plus Lena Olin in Havana)

I remember thinking that Sneakers was quite good when I saw it in the early 90s, which looking back seems like a kind of prototype for the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films with all of its 'cyber' stuff and paranoia double crosses and elaborate heist plans. Though I have not seen it recently to confirm that sense!

Given that Michael Ritchie-Redford collaboration Downhill Racer has made it into the Criterion Collection, it would be great to see their re-team up in the brilliant political film The Candidate again some time. You can kind of see its influence on Tim Robbins' later Bob Roberts. That might be rather uncomfortable in the current climate though, when the world kind of got the man that these films were suggesting was necessary to break through the political framework!

And I have not got the chance to see it yet but I would be really interested to check out the late period re-teaming of Redford and Jane Fonda in the (unfortunately titled if you are saying it too quickly) Our Souls At Night!

[Mr. Deltoid]

I can't believe he was 89! Mad to think he was well into his thirties when he played the Sundance Kid. An astonishingly good-looking guy, but maybe that worked against him as much as it aided his career? He was up for the leads in Barry Lyndon, The Godfather (as Michael) and The Graduate, but ultimately lost out on all three, the latter allegedly because Nicholls thought no-one would believe him in the role of virgin.

[The Curious Sofa]

Of the three films he made with George Roy Hill, The Great Waldo Pepper is the least successful, and it's my favourite of the lot (I can't stand The Sting). I first saw it at a young age and THAT SCENE with Susan Sarandon, really shook me (and also is the reason why it flopped). I loved All Is Lost, which, in some ways, is a better version of Gravity. The Candidate is part of a great run of Michael Ritchie films. I watched Sneakers only a week ago. I'd never seen it before, but I'd heard it talked about on a couple of podcasts, and I gather it has a cult following. It was fine, but nothing more. I've been meaning to watch The Old Man & the Gun for ages, so maybe it will be the Redford film I watch in tribute.

[Roger Ryan]

...And I have not got the chance to see it yet but I would be really interested to check out the late period re-teaming of Redford and Jane Fonda in the (unfortunately titled if you are saying it too quickly) Our Souls At Night!

Our Souls At Night is a trifle and its value is entirely determined by how much you like the two leads and want to see them in a film again, but I think All Is Lost and The Old Man & The Gun are very strong later works that equal some of Redford's second tier work in the 70s. Really want to see Waldo Pepper again; only saw it once when first released but much of it has stuck with me for 50 years.

[hearthesilence]

Should add, he also plays Parritt in Sidney Lumet's great TV production of The Iceman Cometh, one of my favorite plays and possibly the best staging available to see. There's actually quite a bit of filmed work from him as an actor before he became a big name star after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

[beamish14]

Let me recommend his 1962 Twilight Zone episode Nothing in the Dark. More than apposite today.

Is William Shatner now the last surviving star of an episode who was an adult at the time of filming?

[hearthesilence]

I didn't like The Way We Were, but I saw it a very long time ago and I'm seeing others make the same claim that it's Redford's finest film performance despite strong reservations about the rest of the movie - could be worth revisiting some day. Also I don't think I've ever seen Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here but Joseph McBride called it underrated and other reviews have argued that it has considerable merit despite some drawbacks - given how much I like Polonsky’s Force of Evil, I'll probably seek that out.

[hearthesilence]

Also, Robert Redford was at La Cinémathèque française back in February 2019 to discuss All the President's Men, which was recorded, and you can view it here.

[bearcuborg]

His idea to cast Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People after noticing that she was (unknown to her) actually was nothing like Laura Petrie is one the great casting coups of all time.

I really adore The Horse Whisperer. Something I don’t think a teenage me would have gone out to see, but I heard Robin Quivers gush about. DP Robert Richardson had a hell of a run in the 90s…

Sneakers is adorable fun.

[therewillbeblus]

I just watched him in an early role in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour's first ever episode, and he already exudes so much natural charisma, overshadowing every other actor despite being a rather unimportant figure in the end

[domino harvey]

Let me recommend his 1962 Twilight Zone episode Nothing in the Dark. More than apposite today.

Is William Shatner now the last surviving star of an episode who was an adult at the time of filming?

His costar George Takei, and also John Astin, Robert Duvall, Ann Blyth, Julie Newmar, and presumably others

[beamish14]

Let me recommend his 1962 Twilight Zone episode Nothing in the Dark. More than apposite today.

Is William Shatner now the last surviving star of an episode who was an adult at the time of filming?

His costar George Takei, and also John Astin, Robert Duvall, Ann Blyth, Julie Newmar, and presumably others

Ah, that’s right. I totally forgot about a few of them being in episodes.

[fiendishthingy]

Is William Shatner now the last surviving star of an episode who was an adult at the time of filming?

His costar George Takei, and also John Astin, Robert Duvall, Ann Blyth, Julie Newmar, and presumably others

Ah, that’s right. I totally forgot about a few of them being in episodes.

Vera Miles and Carol Burnett are two others.